Louisiana Economic Development Secretary Stephen Moret is defending an often-underscored LED claim that Louisiana has outperformed its Southern neighbors and the United States at large when it comes to employment growth since 2008. Greg Albrecht, chief economist for the Louisiana Legislative Fiscal Office, earlier this week called out LED on the claim, saying in a paper published on the office’s website that LED has misinterpreted federal data.
“Mr. Albrecht is cherry picking the numbers,” says Moret in a statement to Daily Report. “His approach would be like going to the Ole Miss game and saying LSU lost the game because Ole Miss won part of the game. Most people would consider the win/loss record to be based on the whole football game, not just part of the game.”
In his paper, Albrecht says LED’s claims are skewed because it benchmarks gains in employment to January 2008, which is the month that Gov. Bobby Jindal began his tenure in office. Albrecht notes that as the recession took hold during 2008 and 2009, Louisiana employment dropped only about half as much as that of the average Southern state and the nation as a whole. Therefore, he says, Louisiana was “much more likely to achieve and exceed the January 2008 starting point” before its peers in the South and across the country.
“The LED misinterpretation can be summed up by saying that if a region drops by only half as much as other regions, then recovers at the same pace as other regions, it will climb back to its starting point in half the time as other regions,” Albrecht writes. “Arithmetically, no other result can occur, and says nothing about the state’s relative economic performance.”
Albrecht says if LED chose to benchmark its data to February 2010, when most other states and the United States had begun to recover from the lowest points of the recession, the data would show Louisiana “has substantially underperformed” in comparison to its peers. Moret flatly disagrees.
“Many of the states Mr. Albrecht is suggesting have economically outperformed Louisiana actually have less jobs today than they had in January 2008,” Moret says. “It makes no sense to suggest such states have outperformed Louisiana during this administration’s time in office.”
See Albrecht’s complete paper, and check out Moret’s complete statement in response.
